at all,—­and suddenly a gale sprung up.  We pulled in the canvas, but to no purpose.  Under a bare pole we seemed every minute to be going under completely.  We have no cabin, and all we could do was to lay flat on the deck in the water, and hold on to anything we could grab.  The natives prayed, by God!  They ’re Catholics, and they remembered it then.  The mate wanted to throw the copra overboard.  I was willing, but I said, ’What for?  We’re dead men, and it’ll do no good.  She can’t stand up even empty.’  We stayed swamped that way all night, expecting to be drowned any minute, and I myself said to the Lord—­I was a chorister once—­that if I had done anything wrong in my life, I was sorry—­”

“But you knew you had?” I interposed.

“Of course I did, but I wasn’t going to rub it in on myself in that fix.  I knew He knew all about me.  My father was a curate in Devon.  Well, we pulled through all right, because here I am, and the copra’s on the dock.  What do you think—­the wind died away completely, and we had to sweep in to Papeete.”

I touched his glass with mine.  He was very ingenuous, a four-square man.

“Did the prayers have anything to do with your pulling through and saving the copra?” I questioned, curious.

“I don’t know.  I didn’t make any fixed promises.  I was bloody well scared, and I meant what I said about being sorry.  But that’s all gone.  Let’s drink this up and have another.  Joseph!”

Helas! the waterspout did not harm my twin half so much as the rum-spout, which soon had him three sheets in the wind and his rudder unmanageable.  When I went down the rue de Rivoli that night to the Cercle Militaire, he had drifted into the Cocoanut House, and was sitting on a fallen tree telling of the storm to a woman in a scarlet gown with a hibiscus-blossom in her hair.  I got him by the arm, and with an expressed desire to know more of the details of the escape, steered him to the Annexe, where he had a room.

A good sort was Dixon.  He had in the Paumotus a little store, a dark mother-girl of Raiaroa who waited for him, and a new baby.  He had been only a year in the group.  He referred to “my family” with honest pride.

The captains of the Lurline and the O. M. Kellogg were at the club.  The Lurline was twenty-seven years old, and the Kellogg, too, high up in her teens, if not twenties.  Their skippers were Americans, the Kellogg’s master as dark as a negro, burned by thirty years of tropical sun.

“I used to live in Hawaii in the eighties,” he said.  “I used to pass the pipe there in those days.  There’d be only one pipe among a dozen kanakas, and each had a draw or so in turn.  They have that custom in the Marquesas, too, and so had the American Indians.”

I walked with the Kellogg’s skipper to his vessel, moored close to the quay in front of the club.  He gave an order to the mate, who told him to go to sheol.  The mate had been ashore.